Dave Winer, 56, is a software developer and editor of the Scripting News weblog. He pioneered the development of weblogs, syndication (RSS), podcasting, outlining, and web content management software; former contributing editor at Wired Magazine, research fellow at Harvard Law School, entrepreneur, and investor in web media companies. A native New Yorker, he received a Master's in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin, a Bachelor's in Mathematics from Tulane University and currently lives in New York City.

"RSS was born in 1997 out of the confluence of Dave Winer's 'Really Simple Syndication' technology, used to push out blog updates, and Netscape's 'Rich Site Summary', which allowed users to create custom Netscape home pages with regularly updated data flows." - Tim O'Reilly.

If the political blogosphere and the tech blogosphere were one, and by tech blogosphere, I don't mean bloggers who work for big tech companies, we could make SOPA a front-burner issue in the 2012 election. Instead the big issues are fictions created by the two parties, with the complicity of the networks. We give the power to determine what stories get coverage to corporate media. It doesn't have to be that way. Bloggers have a lot of power, but we don't use it effectively.

Somehow intuitively it seems that OWS is the perfect organization, such as it is, for building civil disobedience re SOPA.

The problem became clear to me reading David Carr's analysis of SOPA. It was all about corporations. On the one side is Hollywood and on the other is Silicon Valley. That's how news people think. They look for big rich entities that are facing off and make it an epic battle. Unfortunately, you and I aren't factored in. But in this case, as in many others, we will be the ones who are controlled by SOPA. And in a democracy, assuming we still have one, we are have a responsibility to participate in the process. Even if the big companies don't think about us.

SOPA and OWS were made for each other because OWS was born of a mostly free Internet. And SOPA will be used, for sure, to stop similar outbreaks in the future. Think about how NYPD manages these things now, and don't imagine they aren't thinking about managing them via the networks people like to use for this stuff.

A thought for the day!

PS: SOPA is great because it gets people thinking about Internet architecture. But it's also great because it will politically activate people who until now had largely been politically offline.

PPS: We need to merge the political blogosphere and tech blogosphere. As long as there's a division we're weak. That means we have to be reading each other, pointing to each other, and bouncing ideas off each other. These never have been separate, and we, collectively, have been making a mistake by viewing them as separate.